Top Lee Baca Articles

The last time an outsider was elected Los Angeles County sheriff, posses tracked bandits into the hills of Glendora, Charlie Chaplin had just hit movie screens and Angelenos were watching anxiously as World War I began in Europe.
Since the election of...

He has no high-profile endorsements. His last name is often misspelled.
And many voters have no idea he's the guy who spoke publicly of inmate abuse and ordered up audits of jail brutality nearly two years before former Sheriff Lee Baca acknowledged...

The polls have now closed in Los Angeles County, where voters cast ballots to fill dozens of local, state and national offices -- from governor to Congress to county supervisor -- in mostly primary elections that will set the stage for runoffs in...

Todd Rogers saw his life before him, and things looked pretty good. He had completed his student teaching and had been offered a job teaching social studies and coaching the junior varsity girls softball team at Carson High, his alma mater.
"It was...

Paul Tanaka wasn't surprised to find himself in a room with a group of FBI agents.
"I knew this day would come," said Tanaka, then the second-in-command at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "I hoped it wouldn't."
An FBI agent told him his...

In a whirlwind of last-minute stumping, candidates vying to succeed termed-out Los Angeles County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina crisscrossed opposite sides of the county over the weekend, shaking hands, posing for selfies and otherwise...

Trial began Tuesday in the first of several criminal cases to arise out of the federal government's probe into misconduct by sheriff's deputies in Los Angeles County jails, with prosecutors accusing a deputy of conspiring with several of his superiors...

A defense attorney representing a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy charged in a jails corruption case grilled the lead FBI agent Thursday about her agency's decision to smuggle a cellphone to an inmate with a history of violence and lying.
Deputy...

The first question for anyone contemplating the future of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is this: Is it suffering from a few small problems or is it profoundly broken? There's good reason to believe it's the latter.
Consider, for example,...

The baby-faced deputy told a federal grand jury that his hiding of an inmate in August 2011 amounted to "kidnapping," "smoke and mirrors," and technically speaking, breaking laws. The adversary he and his fellow deputies were working against —...

The former undersheriff and a current captain of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department are subjects in an ongoing federal grand jury investigation into excessive force and corruption in the county's jails, a federal prosecutor said Monday.
The...